"The objective of achieving balance in life is constantly being assessed owing to our knowledge of opposing forces. From family, friends, to community. The human body, diet, the life cycle - existence and mortality; the idea of spirit. Our place in the Maritimes, church, state, and equality. Relationships, close or long distance, personal or political, are forever subject to the vicissitude's of external and internal forces. Forever being analyzed, scrutinized, and catagorized." Steven Rhude

Steven Rhude's work is currently touring as part of CAPTURE 2014, which continues its tour at Acadia University Art Gallery in Wolfville May 1 - June 28,
and at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's Western Branch, Yarmouth November 14 - May 15, 2016.

PLANS (Professional Living Artists of Nova Scotia), in association with the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Tom Smart and Peter Dykhuis have organized
CAPTURE 2014: Nova Scotia Realism. STEVEN RHUDE's work is included.
This excerpt is from Canadian Art Magazine. Please follow updates on new exhibition dates here...

"The history of bread is unique in that it tends to embody so many human issues and emotions all at once. It is at the same time social, political, spiritual, economical, geographical, and physical. It seems to come in as many shapes and sizes as people do, and contains a special meaning to each. As an object it connotes thanksgiving, beauty, sexuality, humility, nourishment, and transcendence. As a food it can be sweet or sour. Warm or cool. It can be associated with the simplest of meals, or the most excessive. It easily crosses over the boarders of both rural and urban - and in the history of visual art, it has become one of the most powerful symbols of human objectivity. The first time I saw Picasso's large etching The Frugal Repast, it sent a shiver up my spine. It made me think of how influential this black and white work was on western visual expression. Few works evoke the importance of bread and its conveyance in the history of the human condition as that singular etching produced during Picasso's Blue Period. It encompassed the dark descent of Europe in the 20th century, and for Americans, it was a visual forerunner to the great depression years."

By colour we’re instantly captured and pulled into a journey, a tale, a mystery.
Encountering the bold power of primary colours – the three colours that have travelled with us throughout our rise from the primordial swamp – we know to be prepared, switched on, watchful. Steven Rhude’s work takes this instinctive alert as a beginning. ‘Look’ the paintings seem to say ‘it’s all here. Right on the surface.’ But from that point, we suddenly swirl down into unknown waters.
The subjects, all familiar to some degree, are also slightly at an angle from real life. The paintings are not actually surreal but they wisely wink at the constant possibility of the bizarre at the fringes of the normal. There is narrative too but the canvas is not overloaded with storyline. The plot is nudged in from the edges, whispered from behind the unseen.
The paint surface recalls the dynamism of Jackson Pollock drips or that trademark 1980s marbled-look. All the time though, a smooth eggshell quality marches in the great traditions of Canadian realism. This is a truly novel style. The depth swells beneath us, murmuring a tale about we’re not sure what.
And so we’re left with more questions. How can fishing buoys hanging in front of a landmark or resting behind an empty bottle be mischievous? When is a lighthouse more than a lighthouse? How can calm water brood? These are the untold stories of Steven Rhude’s work that glint like fish, too rapid for the eye, beneath the surface. These are the mysteries that roll under the waves and hills of the east coast – a place where colourful stories begin in a primal journey.

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

Charles Baudelaire, Essay; The Painter of Modern Life

Modernism brought with it massive change, and adherents to Baudelaire’s views were numerous and influential. The work of Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolfe immediately come to mind. At times the modernist perspective was bleak, but still capable of drawing a line through the center; in pursuit of truth. As art critic Jacob Smith said of Edward Hopper in 1956, "... a strain of puritanism and a somberness, a realization that existence is serious and at times desolate - that despite rigid demands, out of every day percolate a radiancy, the haunting spell of life itself."

For those modernists, the point of the proverbial journey was not to get there. Meaning is found in the search. They understood the balance between the transient and the immutable. Opting for the first half of Baudelaire’s definition only, would be like caving in to the anxiety that comes with not having something to base a vision on, as exemplified by our current post modernist practitioners, in all their various guises.

In this post modern society, where we declare our cherished icons surplus, it is the responsibility of the artist to provide a much needed transfusion for the quest to re-fashion a whole out of an impossible number of scraps and fragments.

Steven Rhude

Nikki speaks with Steven about his inspiration and painting process....

Steven Rhude was born in Rouyn Noranda, Quebec in 1959. His father was a Royal Canadian Air Force Pilot and traveled extensively throughout Canada before settling his family in Scarborough, Ontario. In Scarborough, Steven was raised, educated and studied civil engineering at Centennial College. After one year he switched to the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto where he studied fine arts and graduated in 1983 with honors in drawing and painting.

It was at OCAD that Steven was introduced to the pantheon of draughtsmen from Ingres to American modernists like de kooning. Teachers such as Fred Hagen, John Gould and John Newman instilled in Steven the relevance of drawing as a complete form of expression in itself. Steven also attended the colleges off campus program in Florence, Italy for one year which included an intensive study of the Italian and Northern European renaissance. This year of study was made possible by receiving the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation award.

Afterwards, he met Simone Labuschagne and they were married in 1986. Over a period of three years Steven worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a technician installing exhibitions, an experience he still recalls with appreciation due to first hand contact with master works of all kinds.

In 1990, Steven began to devote himself to drawing and painting full time. He and his wife moved to Fox Island Main, Guysborough, County, Nova Scotia. It was there, in relative isolation, that Rhude developed the realistic and colorful style he is known for today. In 2007, he exhibited a 10 year retrospective of his work at Argyle Fine Art, Halifax, NS. In 2010, Steven's "Temple of the Mind" Exhibition was showcased at the Acadia University Art Gallery in Wolfville, NS.

Art critic Elissa Barnard stated "In this body of work Rhude has grappled with and further developed his subject matter, maintaining his engaging style but deepening his ideas and calling on the viewer to put more thought into the work and the plight of coastal communities in Atlantic Canada".

In his work, Rhude continues to explore his passion for themes which evoke the ethos of coastal communities in Atlantic Canada , their social conditions and iconic character. Since moving to Lunenburg, NS. with his family, the town has been a primary source of subject matter and pride. Steven also played a role in the creation of The Art Galleries Association of Lunenburg and is a board member of The Lunenburg Arts Council.

His work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections around the world. Steven's work has been reproduced in various publications, including on the cover and inside the 2009 book "from Land and Sea - Nova Scotia's Contemporary Landscape Artists" and the 2010 coffee table book "A Place Called Away - Stephen Rhude, Living and Painting in Nova Scotia".